AMERINDIA 44: 41-70, 2023
Edson DE FREITAS GOMES
Professor em Linguistica – Universidade Federal do Pará – Brésil
DOI : https://doi.org/10.56551/RVIR2884
Abstract: Dative and locative postpositional phrases, when occurring with certain predicates in constructions that express mental or physical states, are treated as a non-canonical subjects. In these constructions, the dative subject, in clauses with one or two arguments, is marked by the postposition mã and the locative subject, in clauses with one argument, is marked by the postpositions kãm, jã and bê. In this paper, I describe how the non-canonical subjects are marked in Mẽbêngôkre. The data analyzed come from field work, with indigenous consultants from Mẽbêngôkre villages. The syntactic tests applied to the constructions include reflexivization, control and deletion in coordinate and subordinate clauses, and switch-reference. The behavioral and control properties displayed by the dative and locative postpositional phrases show that these constructions share many of the syntactic characteristics of verbal sentences. Considering the applied tests, we conclude that the dative and locative postpositional phrases are subjects.